why Brazil will produce the doses Argentina wanted to manufacture

“Pfizer and BioNTech select contract manufacturers through a rigorous process based on various factors: quality, compliance, safety record, technical capacity, capacity availability, highly skilled workforce, project management capacity, previous working relationship and commitment to work flexibly through a fast paced program.

The statement released by the US pharmaceutical company this Thursday morning could certainly fit Argentina like a glove. All of this is in our country. However, the paragraph mentioned the qualities of Brazil as an imminent producer of the Comirnaty vaccine. The almost obligatory question that arises is: Why Brazil yes and Argentina no?

The story goes back to 2020, when the relationship between the government and Pfizer was the best from the phase 3 trial that the laboratory carried out at the central military hospital. Comirnaty was the first vaccine approved by ANMAT in Argentina on December 7. But as you know, rusty links upon approval of the vaccine law.

Sources who closely followed the negotiations between Argentina and Pfizer at the time ensure that the first thing the government asked the lab for was if i could make the vaccine in the country. Interest was based – as was later confirmed with the AstraZeneca vaccine – in the still healthy fact that it existed technology transfer and the doses could be produced here.

But Pfizer at the time was just starting to produce and the answer was that It was not the moment move forward in this direction. The rest of the story is known: the concepts of negligence and sovereign risk assets they were, according to what has been said and repeated in official circles, obstacles for eight months impossible to overcome.

While the laboratory has always kept it a secret, the government has chosen to defend the failure of negotiations with attacks on the pharmaceutical industry on the supposed unfair terms that he intended to impose so that the country could access the doses which gradually reached all south america, less in Argentina.

One of the countries which succeeded in overcoming these obstacles long before ours was Brazil, which made it possible – we see it now – not only advance access to the first doses that Argentina does not wait until September, but at the same time to move forward in the project which is now formalized: the Eurofarma plant will obtain the transfer of technology from Pfizer and production will start in 2022.

Of the government they always denied that this initial refusal by Pfizer to have its vaccine manufactured in Argentina would have been a source of disappointment to move faster in the conclusion of a contract. Either way, in time there was finally a deal and now they will come to pass 20 million doses – this is planned – before the end of the year.

As we said at the beginning, it’s not all scientific qualities and installed capacity Argentina did not have one to possibly meet this challenge. However, one of the differences was the route carried out by the two countries until they reach this August 26, 2021, when it is known that Brazil was chosen to do what Argentina intended at one point in the pandemic.

From our country, it was then possible to move forward with this desire to transfer technology through the contract for 22.4 million vaccines from AstraZeneca, through antigen production in the Mabxience laboratory, and the work of formulated and packaged which is now being carried out by the Richmond laboratory with the antigen arriving frozen from Russia.

PS